Jeroen Joly

Do the Media Influence Foreign Aid Because or in Spite of the Bureaucracy? A Case Study of Belgian Aid Determinants

Bureaucrats are considered to play a determining role in how much media signals influence the allocation of foreign aid. As foreign aid decision-making is assumed to be a predominantly bureaucratic matter, bureaucratic responsiveness to media has often been concluded from the observation that foreign aid responds to media attention. Yet, studying this bureaucratic responsiveness directly has proven to be a challenging task due to the difficulties in quantitatively measuring bureaucratic activities. This study examines the different determinants of foreign aid in Belgium from 1995–2008 and addresses the question of bureaucratic responsiveness to media directly by isolating aid that is exclusively decided by the bureaucracy.

Disentangling media effects : the impact of short-term and long-term news coverage on Belgian emergency assistance

Whether and how media are able to influence policy and the political decision-making process is still the topic of much debate. However, if news media are indeed able to influence policy, they are commonly believed to do so indirectly through their agenda-setting function – by getting issues onto the political agenda after sudden peaks of attention. Yet, despite the assertion of agenda-setting theory that policy changes occur mainly through steady advocacy of policy alternatives, little attention has been paid to the long-term effects of media exposure. The analysis of emergency assistance in Belgium from 2000–2008 shows that short-term and long-term media attention to specific countries affect decision-making in quite different ways. This study reveals different ways in which media attention can impact policymaking, as short-term attention mainly determines which countries receive assistance, while long-term attention affects the amount of assistance granted.

Explaining Entrepreneurial Status and Success from Personality: An Individual-Level Application of the Entrepreneurial Orientation Framework

Entrepreneurial orientation is defined as an organization’s strategy, describing its innovativeness, proactivity, risk taking, autonomy and competitiveness. We argue that this concept can be translated to the individual level as a constellation of five personality traits that characterize entrepreneurs. We examine the usefulness of these five traits in explaining entrepreneurial status and success. Our results show that entrepreneurs score higher than non-entrepreneurs on innovativeness, proactivity, and risk taking. In addition, latent growth curve modeling revealed that the individual EO traits were related to objective venture performance, albeit only after introducing venture life cycle as a moderator. In line with a differentiation perspective, risk taking, innovativeness, need for achievement, and need for autonomy were positively related to revenue and number of employees when venture life cycle was high. In line with a situation strength perspective, need for autonomy was positively related with growth in number of employees when venture life cycle was low. We conclude that individual entrepreneurial orientation offers a useful framework to understanding entrepreneurship once situational factors, such as venture life cycle, are taken into consideration.